


Before Adam

by gayalondiel



Category: Frankenstein - Nick Dear
Genre: Angst, M/M, Slash, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-09
Updated: 2011-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-19 05:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayalondiel/pseuds/gayalondiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone’s missing from the play. This is one idea of where he is. (AU from both book and play).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Before Adam

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Well... it could be squicky. There’s a dead guy in it.
> 
> Disclaimer: Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was written by Mary Shelley and is one of my favourite books of all time (and is public domain now). Conceptually this is in the world of the Nick Dear/Danny Boyle Frankenstein which I adored with all my heart.  
> AN: I blame morelindo completely for getting me started down this path. I swore I’d never do this. What monsters we create...  
> Beta: sally_maria is made of love and win and excellent spellchecking abilities.

_Was this how I was formed? Stolen at night from wet soil?_

If he hadn’t been grieving, Victor would have thought it serendipitous. He was ready for a body, on the lookout for a suitable death. It was a male of the right age. The fall was not ideal for his purposes, the body broken, would have scarred were it still alive. But it had come to him on the wings of opportunity and he was too far along the road now to be denied.

It was a body he had long admired. A fellow student, fair and gleaming, his hair blond and his eyes bright and shining. They had got on well, sharing ideas and inspiration, and in their second year in Ingolstadt had opted to take rooms together. When Victor had been too many days in his laboratory the other would come to him, haul him bodily from the room and into the bright sunshine where they would walk the town for hours, deep in discussion and fellowship. In the evenings they would retire to their rooms and stage debates over strong wine and a blazing fire. Where Victor was a man of science his friend was moral and virtuous, arguing the importance of rights and the nobility of human causes over the demanding logic of mathematics and chemistry. They were in many ways opposing forces, but their minds met and found common ground, friendship, even affection.

On those nights Victor would steal glances across the room, forbidden thoughts crossing his mind as he watched his friend. He wondered what it would be like to hold him in his arms and whisper his secrets to him. His experiments, the ideas which he had voiced to no-one. The spark of life... he was certain his friend would understand. He would tell him soon. He was almost ready.

Then in a moment of mischance, he was too late and his friend was broken on the ground beneath his horse.

It was almost too easy to access the body. The family should by rights have sat up and watched with him but they had travelled from Geneva to Ingolstadt to lay their only son to rest, and not being wealthy the journey had been difficult enough even had they not been prostrate in grief. Victor offered and was granted the right to take the watch alone, and by the time they arose and composed themselves for the funeral, the casket was closed and no-one knew that the body within was not that which it should be.

These were not the injuries Victor would have chosen to work with. The wounds were too great, the sutures too many. He would not be the beauty he once had been. His skin no longer shone, although maybe the spark of life would imbue it with that brilliant lustre once more. His hair was gone, sacrificed in repairing the skull and ensuring that the brain had not taken too much injury. Remarkably, it seemed intact. He should remember. Surely he would recall the days they had spent together in laughter and debate. Perhaps he would wake, recognise Victor, see how devoted he was to their friendship that he reached out even across the void of death and returned him to the world. Perhaps he would see through that devotion to the feelings Victor kept locked away in his own soul.

He had never before considered the soul. He had thought only of animation, bringing movement to muscle and breath to lungs. But certainly the brain housed the soul, it could only be so. Men with mangled bodies and intact brains retained their souls completely. This brain could not have been so long inactive as to lose its hold on itself. The heart too was intact, though most of the other organs were damaged and needed replacing. The brain and the heart were retained. The soul must be too. He would remember. He must.

For weeks he worked, labouring to assemble the new organs and tissue structures as swiftly as possible. The brain he retained in a state of mild animation, attempting to prevent the essence of life from slipping from it, breaking the connections only when it was necessary as he worked around it. Eventually he suspended the naked form in the incubator, and took a moment to survey it as it pulsed gently, to reach out and touch the no longer crystalline skin, to examine the sutures for strength and the muscles for potential grace. He thought of the moment those eyes would open. Recognition and understanding would spark in them, and he would leave the incubator, walk to Victor, and take his hand with thanks and promise.

It was true, he was no longer the beauty that he had been. But he had the most beautiful mind and soul Victor had ever known.

“Soon,” he whispered, cradling his cheek as though the slowly shifting body was already under its own impulse and not the animation of the machinery. “Soon, my friend.”

* * *

“I should be Adam. God was proud of Adam.”

Victor surveyed the creature, and the walls built over twelve long months crumbled. Walls that had insisted it was science, nothing more. An experiment, an equation, to see if he could, nothing more. The thing, when he first saw it moving, had been broken and battered and inhuman, flopping like a fish on the floor with no spark of recognition in its eyes. Now it stared at him and snarled, loping around and speaking in thick stilted tones, unrecognisable from its origins.

 _You were never intended to be Adam. You should be Henry._


End file.
